VideoElephant Wants To Be The iStockphoto Of Pre-Packaged Professional Video Content

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Irish startup VideoElephant is launching its video content marketplace this week. Gunning to be something along the lines of an iStockphoto for professionally-produced short-form video packages, the site offers an easy way to buy and sell video content, with the target market on the buyers’ side being web publishers, mobile publishers, and operators in the VOD/IPTV space.

At launch, VideoElephant is stocked with over 50,000 videos from providers such as AFP, National Geographic, ABC, VideoJug and Press Association. It’s differentiating itself from similar pre-packaged video marketplaces by shunning revenue sharing for a straightforward purchase and instant download model where each video comes with a worldwide, perpetual license and can be monetized by the publisher how they wish.

That’s a first, claims VideoElephant (iStockphoto itself actually sells video with a similar model but it’s more generic stock video not pre-packaged content), and is in contrast to the syndication model employed by competitors such as Grab Media, Aol (owners of TechCrunch) or Media Peers. “[They use] a revenue share model which means publishers do not keep 100% of ad revenue,” says the startup.

In addition, there are offline agents who operate through markets such as NAPTE and MIPCOM. “However, these markets are prohibitively expensive for many web publishers, pricing models vary widely, and negotiations can take months to complete,” claims VideoElephant.

Instead, buyers on VideoElephant simply browse or search the available content, hit buy and then can download in various formats to do as they want. The Irish company then takes a 30% commission on each purchase.

Along with today’s launch, VideoElephant is announcing that it’s raised $1 million from ACT Venture Capital and Enterprise Ireland, though the round was actually closed in January.